The Higgs boson by the numbers

This photo shows the tunnel of the Large Hadron Collider, where beams of particles pass through the central pipes before colliding with each other.

CERN

View photo

For physicists, July Fourth fireworks may have come in the explosive announcement that a new particle had been found, one that is likely the long-sought Higgs boson thought to confer mass on all other matter.

7,000: The weight of the detector used for the ATLAS experiment in metric tons.

2,900: The number of scientists who took part in the ATLAS experiment searching for Higgs in the Large Hadron Collider.

3,275: The number of physicists involved in the CMS experiment (1,535 are students)

1,740: The number of physicists with doctorates who are involved in the CMS experiment.

250: The number of those CMS physicists with Ph.D.s who are women.

11,000: The number of times per second each proton goes around the LHC ring while travelling 99.999 percent the speed of light.

100,000: The number of CDs it would take to record all the data from the ATLAS detector per second, or a stack reaching 450 feet (137 meters) high every second; at this rate, the CD stack could reach the moon and back twice each year, according to CERN.

27: The number of CDs per minute it would take to hold the amount of data ATLAS actually records, since it only records data that show signs of something new.